LA-based artist Umar Rashid is bringing his “The Anansean World of Robert Colescott” to Blum. The curated show combines 30 paintings and drawings from five decades of Colescott’s career. Works include drawings from the early 1950s, when Colescott would have been studying in Paris under Cubist artist Fernand Léger, semi-abstract paintings from the late 1960s, and works from the height of his career from the 1970s to the 1990s. The exhibition at Blum Los Angeles aims to shed a different light on the artist known for his harsh social critique of the US.
Rashid brings a lifetime of adoration for Colescott, focusing on the historical aspects of the influential artist’s work.
Robert Colescott
Robert Colescott’s most famous painting is “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook” (1975). The work has since been acquired by the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art at a Sotheby’s auction in 2021 for $15.3 million. Rashid drew inspiration for the exhibit from numerous spirits, including Ananse, a spider deity and trickster from West African mythology, positioning Colescott as the “grand trickster of the ages.”
Umar Rashid’s Reflection on Colescott
Rashid writes of Colescott, “The appellation is incredibly apt in terms of his artistic practice. Yet he was not born thus but forged through the crucible of being an African American fine artist in a time of limited opportunity for those like him and the ideals he sought to bring forth in a postindustrial world burdened by draconian racial awareness, social robotization, and post-imperial, imperial war machinations.”
Rashid came into contact with Colescott’s “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware” years ago and compares the experience to a dream. Though he did not know the name of the pivotal work, Rashid knew of the iconic Leutze painting on which it is based.
Artistic Influences
Rashid grew up frequenting art museums with his father. He was taken by prominent artists such as Horace Pippin, Jacob Lawrence, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Elizabeth Catlett, who created a canon of Black painters in his mind. It was in this environment that Rashid first experienced Colescott. He recalled in an interview, “I remember the Colescott and not thinking about or not looking at the cartoonish representation of Black people, but just looking at Black painters in general in the painting. But this painting just really stood out because it was historical. At the time, I didn’t get the tongue-in-cheek aspect of it. I didn’t see all the things that were happening. I just saw the image.”
In 2018, Rashid was hosting an exhibition at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson when the curator told him that Colescott used to teach at that university. This brought him back to studying his work through a historical lens. Before that, Rashid was only familiar with Colescott’s nudes and Léger-era pieces. The Blum exhibition showcases a broader scope of his work to introduce the influential artist to a new audience.
The curated exhibition runs through May 17 at Blum Los Angeles.
